Rick's August Tirade
Will the Real God Please Stand Up?
When I was a mere pup, no older than some of the unopened soup
cans in my cupboard today, I used to believe that God looked like
Arthur Godfrey.
For those of you too young to remember, Arthur Godfrey's benign
countenance beamed its way into millions of American homes during
television's infancy. He was among the first and most legendary of
the daytime talk-show hosts. His cheerfully bulbous features -- the
features of a middle-aged cherub -- conveyed a benevolence that
passeth all understanding. To my three-year-old mind, he was almost
an object of reverence. I watched in awe as his image materialized
on that mysterious glowing screen.
When I first heard about God, I assumed he was simply a more
distant incarnation of Arthur Godfrey. The names were similar; maybe
they were cousins. And from that time forward, whenever I tried to
visualize the face of God, I would invariably see the puffy cheeks,
the mirthful eyes, the perpetual beaming smile of... ARTHUR GODFREY.
There was no avoiding it. In the crazy maze of my youthful
imagination, God and Arthur Godfrey became inextricably linked. At
school, when we'd say grace before our mid-afternoon snackfest of
milk and cookies, there was Arthur Godfrey nodding his approval from
on high. When I walked through a field on a sparkling day and dared
to look the sun in its face, it was the unmistakable face of Arthur
Godfrey I beheld. Godfrey was everywhere, and he made me feel at
ease in the world.
Only later did the more orthodox theologies cloud my sunny
relationship with the supreme deity. Yes, God was our shepherd, his
mercy was everlasting, and his truth endureth to all generations.
But he was also known to pull an occasional fast one.
The God of the Old Testament could be alarmingly ruthless and
persnickety. He had a nasty penchant for punishing the innocent
along with the guilty, yet nobody quibbled with his decisions. Why
would he drown hordes of helpless children in the Flood, or smite
all those firstborn sons in the land of Egypt, or turn Lot's good
wife into a pillar of salt? For that matter, why would he condemn
all of humankind because our first ancestors ate some unwashed
fruit? And why the seemingly petty obsessions with dietary habits
and Jewish men's hairstyles? Could the creator of the galaxies
really be all that chagrined if we ate a bratwurst?
Even the New Testament God, with his mellow '60s message of love
and brotherhood, could turn spiteful if we didn't play by his rules.
Sure, he'd reward us if we accepted his son as our personal lord and
savior; otherwise we could bake in hell for all eternity. And how
would he know which of us deserved a place of honor in his own lofty
accommodations? He'd have to tally the scoresheets of billions of
individual humans from the Paleolithic to the present. As if he
isn't busy enough inventing new viruses or destroying stars in the
dark regions beyond the Crab Nebula.
And how is it that so many generations of believers have bowed to
his more unfathomable whims with the bland resignation of sheared
sheep? Eighteenth-century burying grounds are littered with the
remnants of human bodies rudely snatched in their infancy; I've seen
mildewed monuments to entire broods carried off by a single
epidemic. How could the faithful parents not have been consumed by
rage at their presumptive benefactor? Meekly and heroically, they
subjected their own will to his: "Here lyeth all that is Mortal
of our beloved Daughter Elizabeth, whom it pleased God to take from
us in the seventh Yeare of her Age. Praised be His glorious
Name." If they felt betrayed, they didn't let it ruffle their
periwigs.
Creator, benefactor, destroyer, heartbreaker. Exactly what kind
of deity are we dealing with here? Who IS this God that so many of
us have worshiped, abandoned, loved, cursed, wrestled with, and
obsessed about for all these many centuries? Is he a charitable
fellow whose eye is on the sparrow, or a remote and brilliant
physicist more concerned with gravitation than salvation? Might he
be the abstract, beneficent Providence invoked by Franklin and
Jefferson? How about Chairman and CEO of the universe? Does his
tolerance for evil make him indistinguishable from the devil? Could
he be (choose one) Yahweh, Zeus, Allah, Wotan, Quetzalcoatl, Ahura-Mazda,
Shiva or the Tao? Is he dead, nonexistent or just retired? Have the
New-Agers discovered him in their hazy preoccupation with healing
energy? Finally, could he be a she? Will the real God please stand
up?
I have a suggestion. If we want to get better acquainted with
God, let's look at the world he created. We should see his imprint
all over it, shouldn't we? By his works we shall know him. It seems
so simple, so obvious... I'm astonished that none of the major
religions ever considered it before.
What can we deduce about God by observing the world?
He must love insects, for he made so many of them. They must have
been his favorite hobby when he was young, and he never lost his
fascination with them. The termite population alone is said to
outweigh the world's human population by a ratio of ten to one. In
other words, for every hundred-pound fashion model, the good lord
has provided the world with a thousand pounds of termites.
He's fond of stars, obviously; they're as staggeringly numerous
as grains of sand, which he also must love. Crabgrass, dandelions,
ragweed, cancer cells, antibiotic-resistant bacteria -- all favored
by the Almighty. You'd think he'd like dogs, but he suffers them to
live only a dozen or so years, while parrots frequently become
centenarians. Sometimes there's no accounting for his taste.
I'm convinced that God loves a good prank. When I drop a screw
and it promptly rolls out of sight... when I can't find a checkbook
that was in plain view not five minutes ago... when I'm on a date
and I see the woman of my dreams sitting alone at the next table...
there I discern the handiwork of the Almighty in all its mischievous
glory.
God appears to be fairly enthusiastic about sex. The entire
pageant of life revolves around the act of procreation. We tend to
grow extinct without it. If God cast a dim eye on the felicities of
conjugation, he would have had us reproducing like mushrooms or
amoebas. Instead, he invented genitals.
Somewhat surprisingly for a divinity who endorses procreation,
the real God is tough on babies. Perhaps ten percent of lion cubs
survive their first year. The numbers are even more depressing for
lesser creatures. If you enter this world as a crab or a herring,
good luck. You're FOOD -- even before you GROW UP to be food. Among
our own favored species, as we've already observed, infant mortality
has been a fact of life for millennia. In some of the most
godforsaken nations, half the children are history by the age of
five.
In general, God appears to concern himself more with the breed
than the individual. It matters little to him what happens to every
Tom, Dick and Hideki; they're expendable commodities on the
battlefield of life, much like the countless shrimp that end up on
our cocktail plates. To God, one shrimp is pretty much like another
-- no matter that the population is decimated and millions of lives
are lost, as long as a few lusty specimens survive to perpetuate
their genes.
Now and then he'll give up on an entire breed that proves too
hapless or absurdly designed. Dodos, dimetrodons, great auks and
giant ground sloths have all joined the roster of God's Edsels.
They're just a few of his discontinued models.
God may be preoccupied with species, but he seems to delight in
tormenting certain types of individuals. Crazy people, sickly
people, the weak, the ugly, the maladjusted, the shy, the stupid,
the overly intelligent, the insecure -- chronic sufferers all. He
values pluck and aggressiveness; the go-getter who builds his own
successful sheet-metal business is the good lord's fair-haired boy.
God appears to be ambivalent toward the Jewish people he professed
to embrace as his nation; he has granted them success and
distinction at the price of eternal vigilance.
But God has the most fun with artists and writers: he inflames
them with the desire to rival his own creations, then douses their
overheated ambitions with a cold spray from the garden hose of
reality. If they persist, he slams them to the ground and tweaks
them on the proboscis for good measure. A fortunate few break free
and prosper; the others lament the day they didn't become bank
clerks.
You have to wonder why the Almighty would go out of his way to
thwart the competition, for no human can rival him as an artist. God
has yet to create an ill-formed mountain or tree. His birds and
butterflies are mostly magnificent. No Monet can match the color and
composition of his most enchanting landscapes. Rockbound coasts,
fields of wildflowers, the glint of sunlight glowing through
translucent green leaves, a silent explosion of cumulus clouds, the
purples and golds of sunset -- all smack of artistry beyond the
limits of human attainment. He deserves our critical acclaim.
But still the hard truth remains: God can be as merciless as he
is magnanimous. What do we make of a Providence who destroys as
readily as he provides? Can we still be friends? Or do we need to
keep genuflecting while we duck for cover? An adversarial God is
small comfort when we're struggling to survive. His opposition
exhausts us. More and more often, I've found myself longing for the
sunny God of my youth.
The other day, after work, I was walking along a stream a few
miles from town. I crossed over a graceful stone bridge, then
proceeded up the road. On my right, behind an old Pennsylvania Dutch
farmhouse, a little girl was frolicking with a woolly white dog.
Both of them seemed to exult in being young and alive together. It
was high summer. Tall flowers shot upward in a brilliant profusion
of colors straight out of a Crayola box. The early evening sun cast
a pleasing golden-green patchwork across the lush lawn, while
thrushes warbled from the cool darkness of the trees. It was as
nearly perfect a scene of earthly contentment as one could hope to
see.
I looked into the western sky, where the sun reclined gently
toward the horizon -- a calm, benevolent, cherubic sun. Could it be?
There, amid peach- colored clouds, the unmistakable countenance of
Arthur Godfrey beamed again. My old friend was back in his rightful
place after a long and painful absence; his smile comforted me.
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
